STL Art Game-Changers: De Andrea Nichols Wants To Hook You Up For A Better City

When you attend an event involving De Andrea Nichols, be prepared to meet your match. Not your romantic soulmate, although that could happen. More likely, your partner in community engagement.

Nichols, 26, is a community arts organizer, designer and social worker who’s the Education and Outreach Coordinator at the Contemporary Art Museum. When she’s not working at CAM, she’s entrenched in one of the many projects of her own nonprofit, Catalysts by Design. Sometimes the twain does meet.

“CAM is very supportive of my zany and creative ideas,” Nichols laughed.

The names of projects Nichols works on are often quirky and pun-filled, like Yarning to Know St. Louis.

“Yes, yarning,” Nichols repeated, rolling her eyes. “Each participant used a string of yarn to map identities. As you add on layers of yarn, you see all the webs of connectedness each person has with each other and with the city.”

Sometimes, adding on to that web that may mean sharing a tiny, enclosed space with someone you’ve never met. Such was the case at a June event at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation’s and Washington University’s PXSTL tent space in Grand Center. The gathering was for the United Story project, a program of Catalysts by Design.

The balls had conversational topics written on them, to get the brainstorming started. The point was to foster collaboration among people with ideas for bettering St. Louis.

“Every idea builds a stronger next idea,” she said.

Listen

Listening...

/

4:01

Even the best ideas need to be paired with a deep understanding of the area being served. De Andrea Nichols talks with Nancy Fowler about how a failed project in Greensboro, Ala., led her to St. Louis and Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work. Among other issues, Nichols was the only person of color working on the project in a predominantly black, low-income community.

Potluck and Passions

Food can be an important ingredient when it comes to building on ideas. That’s the thought behind Catalysts’ FoodSpark. Participants bring a potluck dish along with their ideas for creating change.

FoodSpark at PXSTL

Credit Stephanie Zimmerman | St. Louis Public Radio

A recent FoodSpark was responsible for bringing together the people behind a popular local photo project that now has more than 17,000 Facebook “likes.”

“Two participants who did not know each other found commonality amongst themselves for both storytelling and photography, and — voila! They started Humans of St. Louis,” Nichols said.

The idea is to help young people learn how to innovate. But that’s just the first step.

“We want to extend that, to help young people learn how to become entrepreneurs with those innovations,” Nichols said. “Like taking the idea of that T.K.O. machine and saying, ‘How can we earn revenue from this? How can we actually provide jobs to ourselves, as teenagers?’”

Gallery owners have moved two doors down and across one street to 2607/09 14th St. in Old North St. Louis. The gallery, run by William Burton and Robert Ketchens, will retain its name. They plan a grand re-opening in July.

Stan Chisholm’s whole working-in-Styrofoam thing started with a need to keep moving.

Wood is heavy. Styrofoam is light. It can be broken into pieces and easily transported in a suitcase or even a backpack, especially important during his car-less time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Its unconventionality also infuses a bit of dark comedy into Chisholm’s work.

The concept is as simple as a paint-by-the-numbers project: Fifty CSA “shares” are up for grabs at $300 apiece. Each share-buyer receives nine original works — one from each artist — at three “pick-up” events this September, October and November. Every artist walks away with $1,000 and wider exposure.